Summer is almost here--one day away, in fact--so just in the nick of time for a spring shower render, as we bid adieu to an old bathroom in great need of an overhaul.

The word "tentacles" always reminds me of the 1977 "Jaws" quickie that somehow managed to attract Henry Fonda, John Huston and Shelley Winters to its cast, not to mention a very talented octopus who is often shot in close-up. Director Ovidio Assonitis (credited as "Oliver Hellman") later worked with James Cameron on "Piranha II: The Spawning," but who directed what on that movie remains a mystery to this day, perhaps for good reason.

On to making my own tentacles which, thanks to the magic of mograph, have more suckers than a bitcoin convention.

I added eyeballs to the sockets and rigged them to move in unison using a single controller. I also did a quick render of the head using a modified CGAxis texture to see how things are coming along.

Using Cinema 4D R26's new Fit Circle and Flatten tools, which make polygonal modeling much easier, I added sockets for the eyeballs. The surfaces surrounding the sockets were built using the inset tool and the extrude tool. The other side of the head was made using symmetry, saving a lot of effort and ensuring, well, a symmetrical surface. The second screen grab shows the full mesh smoothed out with a subdivision surface.

Back in 2016, I created a post about the passing of Cactus Dan, a colorful programmer who, true to his name, lived in the middle of nowhere, rode horseback and created a series of plug-ins for Cinema 4D that were a godsend to character rigging. After his death, most assumed that his work was gone for good. But the awesome folks at Insydium, the maker of X-Particles, have made his plug-ins available once more, and for free no less. Check them out at https://insydium.ltd/community/cd-tools/
​

A design for a cooking utensils and spices drawer that ended up being discarded when it was decided the stove and refrigerator were too close together. But hey, that's the beauty of designing in 3D; it's not a big deal to make changes.

Yup, them there's some mighty big drawers. Companies like Bauformat use high pressure laminates and melamine in conjunction with Blum hinges to lessen cabinet door weight. This lets designers go all Pacific Rim with the size. I added apples and morning light to make the shot look less monochromatic. Why apples and not a big pizza and a bag of chips is anyone's guess.

A wider angle of the kitchen remodel. As ideas change, the model changes to reflect those ideas. This render uses Cinema 4D's physical sky to add a little morning color. I used Cinema's built-in physical renderer, along with global illumination and ambient occlusion.

I also used the color mapping feature, which can be found under render settings, in the effects tab. Within color mapping's basic properties is HSV model. If you check this box, the HSV model's colors will be converted and only the brightness will be affected. This keeps colors from changing during the render. As the Help feature explains, a "dark blue will not be turned into a purple." 

It's cold in Los Angeles.

Anyhow, this kitchen set is a little challenging in that there is a lot of white material on the cabinets and walls in a very tight space. I'm still in the process of getting everything right, but there's a balancing act between using too little light, which causes the white materials to gray, or using too much light, which blows out the whites. There are a bunch of different techniques you can use to get around these challenges, including increasing the specular width on white materials and turning on photometric lighting. You can also place a plane in front of all the windows on the set and add a material with only "transparency" checked. Within this material, go to "illumination" and check "GI Portal." Once this plane, or planes, are fitted to the windows, it will keep light coming from outside the set from getting too hot and blowing things out. Although sometimes I like blowing things out.

When I rendered this kitchen, I preferred to keep the ceiling and all of the walls in place (as opposed to removing one or two and letting the light come through). The reason why I like to keep everything in place in this particular set is the stainless steel and other reflective materials on the oven, refrigerator and pots and pans, which reflect the environment around the objects. So what to do? I could have used a wide angle lens on the camera to compose the shot, but that distorts the objects, which I didn't want. I ended up applying a composition tag on whatever wall (or side of the set) I wanted to remove, with "seen by camera" unchecked. By placing all of the objects on a particular  set wall in a null, adding a composition tag (with "seen by camera" unchecked) to the null, and right clicking the composition tag, a window appears. Within the widow click "copy tag to children." This prevents the Cinema 4D renderer from rendering the wall and its children, but includes all the good stuff, like reflections. 

Google "Cinema 4D" and "architecture" for YouTube tutorials and more info. I did.